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The cover of Bad Therapy

Bad Therapy

Abigail Shrier, 2024

Examine a provocative case that indiscriminate therapy can weaken ordinary children, while preserving the boundary between everyday distress and mental illness requiring skilled care.

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9 parts, about 21 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Shrier argues that treating ordinary sadness and worry as disorder may leave children more anxious, passive and dependent
  • Helps parents ask whether an intervention fits a real problem, and what could be removed instead of added
  • A polemic that names its limits, separating serious illness from everyday struggle and flagging where evidence is only correlation

Who it is for

  • Parents unsure whether their child needs therapy
  • Teachers weighing classroom feelings check ins and wellness programs
  • Readers sceptical of the growing youth mental health industry

What the summary covers

  1. Who My Argument Is, and Is Not, About2 min
  2. Iatrogenesis: Help Can Harm2 min
  3. More Treatment, but No Causal Proof2 min
  4. Four Pathways from Care to Fragility4 min
  5. When Therapy Becomes School Policy2 min
  6. Trauma, Memory, and Methods2 min
  7. When Measurement May Intervene2 min
  8. Therapeutic Parenting and Lost Authority2 min
  9. Subtraction, Independence, and Growing Up3 min

Recommended by

  • Richard J. McNallyProfessor of psychology at Harvard University
    Essential reading for parents, teachers, and mental health professionals.
  • Elizabeth LoftusDistinguished professor of psychological science at University of California, Irvine
    Shrier persuasively and forcefully demonstrates how mental health professionals (and some parents) often make things worse for the kids and adolescents they aim to help.
  • Amy ChuaYale law professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
    Shocking, revelatory, and eminently important

About the author

  • Abigail ShrierAuthor who wrote opinion pieces for the Wall Street Journal from 2018 to 2020
    • Born in 1978.
    • Both her parents were judges in Maryland.
    • Studied at Columbia College, the University of Oxford and Yale Law School.
    • Senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist at The Free Press.
    • Her earlier book Irreversible Damage (2020) was a national bestseller and an Economist and Times Book of the Year.
    • Bad Therapy was a New York Times bestseller and an NPR Books We Love selection.
    • Wrote Bad Therapy after hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers and young people.
    • Her books have been translated into 25 languages.

Read it alongside

  • Goes deeperThe Anxious Generation

    Abigail Shrier notes that treatment has expanded without a matching fall in depression and calls smartphones a plausible but incomplete contributor, while Jonathan Haidt argues that a shift from play based to phone based childhood is the leading explanation for the decline in teen mental health after about 2010.

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